The OP is hitting at a long lived really difficult problem especially for a place like GitHub - how do you display what people care about? - recommendation engine

Most stars in 24 hours? That gets the same group of 0.1% consistently at the top leading to a stale page.

So Github tried to improve its 'signaling' of what's interesting yet new so you can keep coming back to the trending page?

Is it stars the overall account crossed w/ new? Number of issues opened in 24 hours? Forks?